A decisive moment

Richard
A decisive moment
Starbucks, May 2, 2007

It’s the summer of 1965, and an envelope arrives from the Oxford and Cambridge Schools Examination Board, informing me about my O-level exams. O is for ordinary. Every English child takes these tests at fifteen. Passing qualifies you to stay on at school and enter the sixth form. Failure means you have to start work. If you stay on, you prepare for A-levels—A for advanced. You need to pass several A-levels to qualify for university.

Most students at Humphrey Perkins have studied upwards of ten O-level subjects during the previous three years, but I have prepared in only six, having been thrown out of the other classes for poor performance and unacceptable behavior. I have been barred from Latin, French, and chemistry for being a joker. I act as if I don’t take learning seriously, and I distract others.

The minimum qualification for the lower-sixth is four O-levels. My mother is in the kitchen when I come down to breakfast, stirring sugar into her tea. She passes me the envelope and waits for me to read it. I am greatly relieved to learn I have scraped by with four passes in English, history, geography, and art. My first thought is: Thank god I don’t have to work. My second thought is: Won’t it be great to see Jenny Payne again and slip my hand down her knickers in the fields near the school. My third thought is: I’ll have to buy the special sixth-form tie with its distinctive white stripe. I like the picture.

Jenny Payne! My pretty girlfriend with the page-boy framing a button of a nose and keen brown eyes that follow me as if she is looking for understanding of herself, or me, or the way the world works. I’m a lanky, anarchic boy, fast on the playing field, and she, too, is good at sport. That’s how it starts. We train together. We train together although she is more than good; she’s ranking high in national long-jump meets, and I admire her dedication and skill. She performs in Gilbert and Sullivan shows, while I am all about American soul produced by Stax, the cooler, grittier label that competes with Motown. We train together, although Jenny’s in the A-stream and I am in the C. I despise my ranking, but I don’t yet know how much. Have I been slotted into the C-form, from which I’ve been told by Headmaster Dunn, M. A. that I can expect to get a job as a clerk or a salesperson, because I underperform, or do I underperform because authorities such as Headmaster Dunn, M. A. have determined that the children of tailors are best launched on their low-level courses in life from this modest track?

What is going on with me at school? I know I’m intelligent. Oddly, I don’t doubt that. But I’m not good at learning in those days, or a certain kind of learning. Classes require a lot of rote memorizing and try as I do to master it, my brain rebels, or it isn’t wired that way, or I rebel, thinking I am being found lacking. Certainly, I could try harder and settle myself more for study, but I am already depressed although I don’t know it. Headmaster Dunn considers me a troublemaker and takes as many opportunities as he can find to summon me to his office for a caning. I have been canned many times for walking on the paths reserved exclusively for teachers and prefects, for not wearing my cap when off school grounds, for talking in assembly. Innocent acts may lead to a caning; for the non-innocent, it is compulsory. Sounds like an Orwellian horror show, a page from “Such, Such Were the Joys,” Orwell’s portrait of the British class system as modeled after brutal, public school education. Humphrey Perkins, founded in 1717 “so poor boys could read the Bible,” although open to all classes, still parades the trappings of a tradition-bound institution with rigid rules for uniforms and where you can and cannot tread—all this while outside its walls the political and cultural revolutions of the ‘60’s are under way.

Humor is in part my “fuck-you” to it all. Around the family dinner table, you are rewarded for quick-wittedness. My dad is quite smart, but he has not been able to advance his education—his father, a tailor, having decided that his son would follow in his path. So maybe that’s part of it, emulating my father, whose philosophy is to circumvent confrontation with a quip—if you can make the enemy laugh with you, you can win him over. I’m a sly satirist, clever with words, although at school I use the talent to sabotage myself. At home I receive neither encouragement nor disapproval regarding my studies; my parents’ attitude toward my education—an expression of unknowing, low-level depression as well—is hands-off, unexcited, and accepting, amounting to a bland indifference that seems to reinforce the school’s vision of my future. It’s as if everyone has decided my destiny is to be a C.

With two exceptions. One is my English teacher, Mr. Roper, who has taken me under his wing and encouraged me to write. I am keeping a notebook and have already won the school’s poetry contest, to the disgust and disbelief of Headmaster Dunn, who has been required to shake my hand in congratulation at assembly and award me a boxed set of Ryder Haggard stories as a prize. The other exception is Jenny Payne, my first love. Those eyes! Who does she see? I want to be him, the poet lover. We meet at breaks to jog around the sports fields or snog beneath the shady beech trees edging the school grounds, my hand inching inside her shirt and under her cotton bra toward her pert breasts.

The summer days are dreamy and lush, and inside I am hatching an image of the creature shown to me by Mr. Roper and Jenny. I float, though less adrift now, in a state of excited anticipation. Each morning I set off on my bike and ride along the back roads from one sleepy English village to the next or I meander along footpaths traversing fields of golden barley, riotous rows of yellow and red tulips grown by local Dutch farmers, and deep green pastures by the river where herds of Friesian cows chew their cuds and stare as I pass. The summer is mine without a demand except to try on the new school tie and shirts that my mother, proud after all, has bought for me and the black jacket my Dad has cut and sewn from a length of barathea for my return to school.

A week before classes begin another letter arrives for me, this one from Jenny, who has spent the summer with her well-heeled family cruising the Mediterranean. I picture it as a blue expanse dotted with their ports of call. On a single sheet of note paper as blue as that water she writes that she has fallen in love with a young steward on the ship. They’ve made love! She isn’t returning to school. She’s enrolled in a private college to study Spanish (the language of her lover, I presume) with the goal of entering the tourist industry. She says, goodbye.

Seeing me fold the letter, my mother inquires after Jenny, and I mumble she’s fine but won’t be returning to school. I jump on my bike and stay out all day beneath an ache of cloud that has gathered in the September sky. I read and reread the note, and as I do I come apart as passionately and rapidly as I have constructed myself through her eyes. From a musty phone box on a deserted country lane, I call her house. Her mother answers and says she is sorry but Jenny isn’t able to speak to me and, in a gentler voice, adds that perhaps it will be best if I don’t call again. I don’t. I never see Jenny again. Have I been judged unsuitable by her parents? Has she really fallen in love? Why can’t she talk to me? Is she worried I’ll say something to change her mind?

The first day of school starts as it has the previous five years. We gather in the assembly hall, girls lined up on one side, boys on the other, an impenetrable barrier between them. Prefects shout for sixth formers to go to the back, then fifth formers in front of them, then fourth, and so on, down to the front rows where diminutive and bewildered first years look like lost mice in a tricky maze. They are ordered to stand in front of the stage where the teaching staff are arriving. Headmaster Dunn orders, “All those in form 1-A, follow Miss Walker,” and out they troupe, straggling behind her. A child delays the proceedings by forgetting his assignment, which irritates the testy Mr. Dunn. After consulting his master list again, he looks up at the offending boy. “Make sure you know where you’re going in future, Clithero, or you’ll be making a visit to my office,” he says with the not so veiled implication I know well of a caning.

Slowly, as the forms leave, the hall begins to empty and those left inch forward. I am in the group right at the back. We sport new blazers—mine is also trimmed with silver piping, denoting my house colors for sports—and I’m wearing my new lower-sixth-form tie, with the white stripe between the red and black bands. I look festive. I would be happy were my heart not shattered over Jenny. I’m not aware how sad I feel or the meaning—a sense of having been stopped in my tracks—I’ve attached to her withdrawal of love. I’m careful not to catch Dunn’s eyes, as they rake up and down the advancing rows, lest he clasp an opportunity to target me for abuse.

The hall is almost empty now. The upper sixth, Dunn’s attack dogs empowered to impose detentions, is insuring that no one is smoking in the bog, or walking on a forbidden path, or passing anyone on the wrong side of a corridor. Dunn announces that the lower sixth will be split into two sections with twelve students in each. One group will follow Mr. Russell, the Latin master, the other Mr. Roper, the English master. Dunn quickly recites names, pairing pupil and master. “Andrews, Russell; Arkwright, Roper; Bellows, Russell; Cuthbertson, Roper . . ..” Rusty Russell threw me out of Latin years ago and has had it in for me since, so of course I am hoping to be dealt to old Roper who somehow got me writing poetry. “Yeats, Russell,” Dunn concludes.

I’m not named. Neither is Johnnie Frear. Dunn looks up from the list and glares at us. “What are you doing, Toon?” he bellows.

“Don’t know, sir.”

“What do you mean you don’t know? Which group are you supposed to be in?”

“Don’t know, sir.”

“What about you, Frear?”

“Please sir, don’t know, sir.”

Dunn begins to take on an unhealthy glow.

Russel is leading his group away, but Roper tells his class to wait for him in the corridor and approaches Dunn, “Excuse me headmaster, if I might have word,” and he climbs to the stage where Dunn presides, and they whisper animatedly. I catch Dunn sputtering, “I don’t see how it’s possible,” and “Not school policy.” But in time Dunn stares down and announces loudly, as if the whole school is still present rather than only me and Johnnie Frear, “It appears there has been some confusion in our selection process for the lower sixth. The letter sent to your parents specifically stated that qualification for the lower-sixth requires four academic O-level passes. What are yours, Frear?”

“French, English, math, and cookery, sir.”

“You see, cookery is not an academic subject. What about you, Toon?”

“English, history, geography, and art.”

“Would you say art is an academic subject, Toon?”

“Don’t know, sir.” Of course I do, but I’m in a vortex of mortification and dejection, feeling my hopes drain.

“Don’t know much do you, Toon? Which, if I might say so, is precisely the issue before us. In my opinion, it is all quite clear, but Mr. Roper points out that the letter may have been innocently misinterpreted by your parents. For that reason, Mr. Roper has kindly invited you to join his group. But I will be keeping a very close eye on you. You may go.”

Johnnie walks out beaming. I do not beam, but I move off with Roper, knowing it’s prudent to escape from Dunn as quickly as possible. I remove my tie in the corridor, consequences be damned, although there aren’t any. In the classroom, Roper says we’ll be studying Hamlet in preparation for A-level English, and as we read through the opening scenes, set along haunted battlements, I lose myself in the images and the plight of a confused son enjoined to restore his father’s honor. After lunch I meet with Miss Jarvis to review the geography curriculum. It’s only when I’m leaving that Roper catches me near the school gate and says with kind eyes, “Don’t worry. If you work hard you’ll soon earn your sixth-form place.”

Looking back at the scene now, I see he is giving me a chance, not extending charity; he believes in my ability, and in his way protesting against snobs like Dunn. But I can’t see any of this. I feel pitied, and I come from foolishly proud people who double over with shame if they have somehow found themselves out of place and perceive they are being tolerated. Roper is saying, “You can have a place here,“ while I hear, “You don’t belong at school; you haven’t earned it.” And so instead of buckling down and swallowing my embarrassment, I bolt from the opportunity as I will many times in the future until, I suppose, I cease to care about how others view me—or don’t care as painfully and tragically as then. I determine to leave. I don’t discuss it with my parents. I don’t say anything to friends. I stay at school for a few weeks as autumn comes on, jogging around the track on my own at lunch, feeling like a ghost. One day I tell my parents about my decision; I’ll go to a community college or get a job. They don’t put up much of a fight, perhaps understanding my discomfort, perhaps feeling as confused as me. By November, when the leaves are dropping from the beech trees, I am gone.